Warkworth
Warkworth in Northumberland is one of the finest small castle towns in England, a village dominated by the ruins of a great medieval castle whose combination of the castle, the fortified bridge, the medieval street running between them and the hermitage cut from the rock of the riverside cliff creates one of the most complete and most atmospheric medieval townscapes in the northeast. English Heritage manages the castle and the hermitage, and the combined visit provides an excellent half-day of medieval heritage in a beautiful Northumberland setting. Warkworth Castle was the principal seat of the Percy family, Earls of Northumberland, whose power in the medieval north of England was second only to the crown. The magnificent keep, built in the late fourteenth century in the unusual form of a cross within a square, is one of the most ambitious and most architecturally sophisticated castle towers in England, its multiple levels of accommodation designed to house the household of one of the most powerful magnates in the kingdom. The castle features in Shakespeare's Henry IV as the seat from which Hotspur departs for the rebellion that ends at the Battle of Shrewsbury. The hermitage, carved into the sandstone cliff above the river a short walk from the castle, is one of the few surviving medieval hermitages in England, its small chapel and living room cut directly from the rock providing an intimate and atmospheric reminder of the religious eremitic tradition that existed alongside the great military and aristocratic establishments of the medieval period.